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China has drastically lowered its rate of population growth, but the rate of growth of its CO2 emissions continues to climb.
China and the US are neck and neck in CO2 emissions, but have substantially different populations.
Policies target countries like India for population reduction, and ignore the US. But US CO2 emissions are 20 times per capita India's. Why not reduce the US population instead? Or that of Qatar?
Total human resource consumption (including pollution emission) does not have a one-to-one relationship with population. There are absolutely NO statistics that prove that such a relationship exists (not even for food or shelter). People who argue that there is such a relationship INVARIABLY refer to animal studies by analogy. Paul Erhlich's projections have long since been discredited, but still have a dangerous lock on discourse.
In the real world, population growth routinely UNDERESTIMATES growth in resource use. Humans are not rats. We can actually decrease population and at the same time increase demands on the environment. Population is simply an inadequate indicator of most environmental harm.
The argument that having less people means more for each person remaining may be true (or not), but it is not an environmental argument. The environment only reacts to how much total pollution is released, not to how many people released it.
